INTRODUCTORY IDEAS FOR

(RE)ADDRESSING PROCESSES OF
IDENTIFICATION

In Performing Identities. Renegotiating
Socio-Cultural Identities in the

Post-socialist Eastern Europe,
Cluj: EFES, 2004,

editat de
Enikő Magyari-Vincze, Petruta Mîndruţ

The conference on Renegotiating Socio-Cultural
Identities in the Post-Socialist Eastern Europe was organized between 28th
and 30th of June, 2003 by several academic and non-governmental
organizations from Romania.
The Institute for Cultural Anthropology (at the Faculty of European Studies, Babeş-Bolyai
University, Cluj), the Interdisciplinary
Group For Gender Studies from the same university, the Foundation Desire from
Cluj, and the Visual Anthropology
Foundation from Sibiu could put together this event
due to the generous financial support of the Open Society Institute/Higher
Education Support Program from Budapest and of the East-East Program of the
Foundation for an Open Society Institute from Bucharest. The participants
were scholars and activists from Romania,
Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia
and Hungary
working on several scientific domains, like cultural anthropology, sociology,
philosophy, political sciences, history, philosophy, and psychology. But, as
planned, the conference had a Western participation as well, in particular from
universities from The Netherlands, Great Britain
and the United States
-- financially this was possible due to the existing partnerships between them
and our institutions.

Our main objective was to create a framework for a critical
and difference-sensitive dialogue between Eastern and Western scholars and activists working on issues of
socio-cultural identities and social transformations in the contemporary Europe. The organizers' endeavor was as well as to
increase the awareness of the Romanian academic, political and public opinion
about the social inequalities among different categories within and between
countries of the region, and the impacts that the post-socialist transformation
processes are having on women and men of different ethnicity, gender, age and social
position. Finally -- through this event -- we intended to continue and to begin
collaborative work between scholars from Eastern and Western universities, but
as well as to carry on the existing
co-operation between academics and activists working on issues of
discrimination and equal opportunities.According to these
objectives our goals were: to identify the key theories, concepts and
methodologies used in the research of the socio-cultural identities and in
understanding the ways in which multiple identities are shaped by and are
shaping at their turn social changes; to bring to the surface the varied
experiences related to the empirical researches pursued in different countries
on our topic and to create a space for exchanging them; to increase the
awareness about the diversity of the issues, approaches, and theoretical and
methodological tools regarding the analysis of the impact of the social changes
on socio-cultural identities; to discuss the complex relationship between
ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the ways in which these axes of
differences are intertwined and are producing different experiences of the
social transformations, and the ways in which power regimes are molding peoples'
opportunities to re-negotiate as active subjects their identities and positions
in different countries of the region; to understand and to emphasize the
importance of the social and cultural research on identities and social
inequalities from the point of view of the elaboration and implementation of the public policies regarding equal
opportunities; to increase public
awareness about the issue of inequalities as linked to identities and social
positions; the films presented during the days of the workshop (available
through one of the organizing institutions, ASTRA) will offer the chance to a
broader public to participate on our event; and last, but not least, to assure
space for a dialog between the participant academics and representatives of
non-governmental organizations, working on issues of discrimination and equal
opportunities.

We
located the discussions about socio-cultural identities in the domain of
politics, i.e. in the context of the power relations (understood in the
broadest sense of the term), which are structuring the social and the cultural order
in all the spheres of private and public life. Considered that individual and
collective identities exist as continuous processes of (self)-identification,
consisting both of the practices of cultural/symbolic naming, social
positioning and political recognition and both of the concepts, images and
feelings resulting from and/or underlying them.

Understood as processes of (re)-negotiation,
identities -- as sets of institutionalized practices and personal experiences
tied to processes of transformation -- and the related issue of social
inequalities, are among the central matters of the post-socialist changes in Eastern Europe. They are embedded in nets of symbolic and
material power that adjust people's thinking about the nature and the direction
of the "proper" changes, define the priorities of the
social-economic, cultural and political development, and eventually re-situate
individuals and communities in the reconstructed hierarchies of different
domains of activity and structure their opportunities both in the private and
public life. Throughout these processes, certain social categories are becoming
the main actors of the public sites, they acquire the abilities, the legitimacy
and the financial conditions of enforcing their self-definition, self-positioning,
ways of life and styles of thinking, while others remain the victims, or in the
best case the silent objects of the naming, inclusions and exclusions imposed
on them by the powerful others. Implicitly, for some, the processes of
transformation signify the chance of articulating their own identity -- both
the forms and contents of their cultural representations, and their
social-material interests -- and of achieving recognition, while for others
these processes imply their muteness and structural inability of displaying
themselves as subjects with legitimate demands.

Briefly
put, identities are negotiated, permanently remade -- at a one hand -- on a
discursive/ institutional level and -- on the other hand -- within the context
of personal experiences. The plan was to discuss our main topic from the
perspective of the similarities and differences within and between women and
men of different ethnicity, sexual orientation, social position, age and
country of belonging, and in particular under the conditions of the
post-socialist transformations viewed in the context of the contemporary Europe. Academics
and representatives of non-governmental organizations were participating at
each session. In this way theoretical issues addressing social inequalities,
discrimination and marginalization, were addressed together with the practical
experiences of organizations activating against these phenomena (besides the
studies, our volume presents briefly some of them).

In the Romanian and East European scholarly world,
the identity issues understood in this manner started to be addressed from a
gender perspective only since a few years ago. Our conference aimed to increase
the impact of such voices on the academic and public life, and to raise the
consciousness about the ways in which the gendered power regimes are defining
differently and unequally the chances of women and men of different ethnicity,
age, sexual orientation and social position to participate as active subjects
in the processes of negotiating on their identities and positions. This
endeavor was strictly related to the fact that the conference was conceived
also as an event, which ended the three year long curriculum development
project of the Interdisciplinary Group for Gender Studies from Cluj, fulfilled
within a partnership with the Centre for Women's Studies from the University of
Nijemgen (The Netherlands) and the Research Centre for Women's Studies from the
University of Sussex (Great Britain).

Unfortunately not all the participants sent their
papers for this volume, and, as the interested reader my observe, the structure
of the latter is different from the way in which the conference program
presented below was structured in plenary discussions and sessions. Through the
way in which we arranged the contents of the book we would like to express once
again our conviction according to which ethnicity, gender, class and other
markers of differences are intertwined, and actually any social phenomena might
be approached from a gender perspective.